Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains by Annie Cheney

Author:Annie Cheney [Cheney, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Plastic & Cosmetic, True Crime, Medical, General, Anatomy, Human Rights/Ethics, Surgery, Ethics, Espionage
ISBN: 9780767917346
Google: YEfjffPw0ZwC
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, across the ocean in America, resurrectionists—or “ghouls” as they were known in the press—were doing a thriving business. While less well known today than its counterpart in England, the American body-snatching business grew into a large and complex enterprise that lasted well into the twentieth century.*3 In 1921, the diener at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine was still buying bodies from a ghoul.

Until the late eighteenth century, there were few skilled doctors and even fewer surgeons in America. Doctors who tended to the sick in Colonial times were often little more than interested laymen who did the best that they could, prescribing remedies of dubious value like bloodletting and vomiting. In the absence of proper medical schools, the distinction between a trained physician and a quack was vague at best.

Ambitious medical students who could afford the journey visited London and studied under famous professors like John and William Hunter. As they returned from their travels and disseminated what they had learned, an interest in anatomy started to take hold in America—in particular in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. According to Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies, between 1810 and 1860, the number of medical schools in the United States increased from just five to sixty-five.

Courses in human dissection had a profound effect on the way in which doctors analyzed the ailments of their patients. For example, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, a surgeon in Kentucky, knew enough from dissecting a corpse to recognize that one of his patients, who claimed to be pregnant, was carrying not a child but an ovarian tumor. Realizing that this woman was in mortal danger, McDowell operated on her at his kitchen table and removed a twenty-two-pound tumor. Within a month, the woman had fully recovered.

By the mid-nineteenth century, all over the country, surgeons and their students were engaged in anatomy courses at medical schools, for which no corpse was spared. These schools, however, bore little resemblance to the medical schools of today. Many of them offered little more than cadavers and a lone instructor, and they were haphazardly run, driven more by commercial values than educational ones. Some were hosted by enterprising surgeons or simply by entrepreneurs who set up the corpses in their basements or attics and allowed aspiring surgeons to dissect them.

Because their main focus was anatomical dissection, the schools were particularly dependent on the availability of corpses and, therefore, on ghouls. Like England, America had no willed-body programs. To dismember a corpse on a table in a room full of strangers was a foreign and barbaric concept, and a punishment in the eyes of the public at the time. Worse, in most states, hanged criminals weren’t available for dissection either. If medical schools wanted a steady source of corpses, they had to find someone who was willing to do the very dirty work of supplying them.

In the early days of body snatching in America, ghouls limited their activities to local graveyards, since they traveled by horse and wagon and had to have enough time to bring the corpses back to the medical schools before sunrise.

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